


Exiles

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Sex Pollen, Technically accidental sex potion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 17:30:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21275000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: John Murphy didn't kill the girl himself, but he's the reason she's dead. Raven’s heard the story often enough: Arcadia’s only murder, only suicide, only banishment. So when she finds Murphy sitting outside the gate, coughing up fire, she doesn’t feel bad for him at all.Second place winner for most unique pairing; second place winner for best use of the modernized canon theme; and second place overall winner in Round Three of Chopped: The 100 Fanfic Challenge 2.0.





	Exiles

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this at about 10:30 last night. Is it good? No. But I wrote it, so here it is.
> 
> For Round 3 of Chopped 2.0: Modernized Canon. This is a re-write of (most of) Murphy's S1 arc, from his involvement in Charlotte's suicide, to his reappearance at the dropship as a biological weapon.
> 
> The tropes: magic au; love potion/sex pollen; hard cut from a character refusing to do X to immediately doing X; secret places.
> 
> A note on consent: the sex pollen/love potion trope by its nature creates situations of dubious consent. This fic doesn't lean into its dubcon elements, but nor does it do anything to lessen those elements or even interrogate them. In other words, your level of comfort with this fic will probably be similar to your level of comfort with this trope in general.

John Murphy didn't kill the girl himself, but he's the reason she's dead.

The exact chain of events Raven doesn't know, because she wasn’t yet living in Arcadia, at the time all of this unfurled. She's heard the story repeated often enough, though, in fragmentary form, hushed like a rumor and sharp like a warning: the community's only murder, only suicide, only banishment.

As it happens, she does know Murphy’s name, and his face, because magic folk find magic folk in the cities and the towns and out in the country, with an inevitability they cannot themselves explain, and always have—even before Arcadia was founded. She's seen him around.

She recognizes him, now. She knows who he is immediately, when she finds him sitting outside the gate, coughing up fire, and she doesn't feel bad for him at all.

*

"He's dying," Clarke says, and Raven scoffs and rolls her eyes, and turns away. She does not want to hear the sorrow in Clarke's voice, or see the sorry way she looks at Murphy from the inside of the gate. He's only a few feet away, but he can neither see nor hear them through the power of Raven's protective spell. He simply sits, propped up against a tree at the edge of the clearing, pale as death and shaking and staring up at the sky.

But he must know, Raven thinks, that he's being observed. She glances at Clarke again, and then at Bellamy. His face, at least, is impassive. He has his arms crossed tight against his chest, his lips set in a thin line.

"You're not seriously considering letting him in," Raven says, after a long beat, and when Clarke doesn't answer, doesn't even meet her eye, she almost loses herself entirely. "Arcadia is a safe place. That's what you told me. And now you want to let him come back—"

"To die," Clarke answers, a hard bite to the last word, and Raven clenches her jaw abruptly shut. "He knows he doesn't have much time left. That's why he's here."

She and Bellamy look to each other, right past Raven, and she doesn't need Bellamy's telepathy to read the conversation they are having with their eyes. She turns from one to the other, then stares out at John Murphy once more. He coughs again, and spits a thin flame out into the dirt, lazily crushes it with the heel of his boot.

"So you're settled, aren't you?" she says.

Bellamy nods, places his hand lightly on Raven's shoulder. She feels his certainty, feels just as surely that he is not at ease. "Arcadia was always supposed to be for everyone. All magical people," he reminds her.

"Says one of the people who banished him," Raven snaps. "Are you regretting that decision? Feeling guilty?" 

She does not bother to let him answer, just pushes past his shoulder and walks back into the settlement. She doesn't need to hear it. She already knows.

*

They let Murphy in, set him up in the spare bedroom on the second floor of Clarke’s house. He doesn’t die. After a time, his condition begins to improve.

“You think he was lying to you?” Raven asks, as she and Clarke sit out on Clarke’s back porch, watching Monty’s garden gently glowing in the twilight.

Clarke takes a sip of her tea. 

“I think I’m more powerful than I knew,” she answers. 

And because she’s not smiling, because she sounds almost melancholy, Raven understands that this is not a joke.

*

The way Bellamy paces through the main hall makes Raven nervous. And this nervousness, calcifying quickly into annoyance, makes her want to start a fight. She crumbles a bit of metal over and over in her hands. She wishes she had Murphy’s power, so that she could set it aflame.

“The reality is that he’s a security risk,” Bellamy says, all at once, stopping abruptly in the middle of the room. He looks out at the rest of them with a hard, expectant glare, like he’s waiting for someone to tell him he’s wrong.

“I could have told you that before you let him in,” Raven answers. The small sounds of the room go quiet when she speaks, a crackling of nerves in the air.

“Didn’t know you were clairvoyant,” Miller says, low, after the beat of silence stretches out too long. Which is rich enough: he didn’t want to allow Murphy back in either. But like the rest of the original residents, he’ll follow Bellamy and Clarke just about anywhere, toward forgiveness just as easily as cruelty—animated, perhaps, by gauzy memories of their early utopia, memories from before Raven’s time.

She opens her mouth to reply, but Clarke cuts her off.

“It’s not him. It’s the others.”

The _others_. The non-magical people. Raven’s mother, scared of the objects her daughter forged upstairs in her room in the dark.

“They infected him,” Clarke’s saying. “They’re targeting us, trying to engineer a disease that will weaken us, or strip us of our power. Maybe kill us.”

“Looks like it’s working,” Jasper mumbles.

Then Monty, right after: “But is it? None of us is sick. And I know Murphy’s power is getting wonky but he’s also recovering—”

“Murphy’s power being wonky could burn down the whole settlement,” Bellamy reminds them. “And no one’s sick because he’s been quarantined. Only Clarke has seen him, and her healer’s immunity protects her.”

“So what does that mean?” Miller asks. “Are we going to kick him out again?”

“No.” Clarke gives a short, decisive shake of her head. “Banishing him made him vulnerable and that made us vulnerable. We’re taking care of our own now.”

“Clarke and I are going to talk to Anya,” Bellamy continues. “We’ll keep Murphy quarantined and guarded during that time, just in case.”

“Although I don’t think he’s contagious,” Clarke adds.

She speaks with a lot of confidence, Raven thinks, for someone who has no idea what she’s dealing with. But that’s fine: if she and Bellamy want to risk their lives talking to the mayor of Tree Valley, that’s their choice, and nothing to do with her.

“There’s just one other thing,” Bellamy says, and when Raven looks up, she finds that he is staring straight at her.

She’s almost afraid to ask. The question comes out wary and slow. 

“And what is that?”

“We need you to guard him.”

“What—No. You don’t.” She’s up on her feet; the metal in her hands cuts with sharp, jagged edges at her palms.

“Someone has to,” Clarke says. “And you’re one of the most powerful people in the settlement. Especially when it comes to protective, defensive magic.” 

Raven crosses her arms against her chest and stares them down. “No. I’m not your guinea pig and I’m not your guard dog. You’re going to find someone else because I am absolutely, under no circumstances, sitting in quarantine with John Murphy while you go off on this—adventure of yours. I won’t do it.”

*

Murphy grins as Raven pulls up a chair next to his bed. “Welcome to quarantine, Reyes,” he greets her, with a sly grin that makes his still-wan face resemble a skull.

Raven throws a potion bottle at him and doesn’t reply.

The potion is a murky green color, faintly fluorescent. As Murphy holds it up to his face, it casts a sick glow against his skin. “What’s this?” He turns it upside down, then right side up again, watching ominous bubbles rise to the surface, taps the cork stopper a couple of times with the tip of his finger. “Poison?”

“Only yours,” Raven answers, and pulls an identical bottle from her pocket.

Murphy’s eyes narrow, truly suspicious now, across his face a cold, slow wariness that she herself knows all too well, and for a moment, she feels true sympathy: here, someone else who’s known, as she has, the brutal need for self-reliance in a dangerous world.

“It’s one of Jasper’s experiments,” she says, and swallows down a laugh as Murphy fakes an expression of alarm, pretends to throw the vial across the room. “He says he thinks he has an idea of how this illness of yours works—”

“I already know how it works. It makes me breathe fire and also it’s trying to kill me—”

“But it’s not killing you. Anyway, this is supposed to make _you_ less contagious.” She gestures to the potion in his hand with the bottle in hers. “And _me _more immune.”

“And you trust this?” 

The question is so deadpan, it hardly sounds like a query at all.

Raven shrugs. “Murphy, I’m already taking my life in my hands just by being in this room with you. At this point—” She uncorks the vial, and reaches out to clink it against his. “I don’t think I have anything to lose.”

*

Maybe the potion makes her immune. Maybe it doesn’t. All she knows is that she wants to climb onto Murphy’s lap.

And then, balanced on his hips, with his warm palms skimming up her sides, she wants to kiss him. 

And she doesn’t, but only because he pulls her down and kisses her first.

*

Something warm, like a fire blazing on a cold night, rippling the air with smoke and the smell of burning wood, is crackling up her skin, setting her hair on end. An electric feeling. Is this how it feels, she wonders, to send up flames from the palms of your hands? She asks Murphy, between kisses. The words get lost in the hollows of their mouths, among the darting explorations of their tongues. This is a _wanting_, perhaps disguised as a _needing_. Nothing she’s ever felt before in her life but the first time she tried magic came close, perhaps, a feeling just as brilliant and just as indescribable, the flare of a dark desire that she could not yet control—just like how, now, she cannot stop kissing him. She cannot be close enough to him. They don’t even bother to take off their clothes—he’s whispering words to her that aren’t spells, but might have been, if she’d said them first. And he’s not warm like a fever but warm like a fire, and they are pushing their clothes out of the way. She sinks onto him, and his breath stutters, and his eyelids close.

*

The mania lessens, in time, though it does not completely dissolve; she still feels giddy and breathless and forcefully alight, feels like she has understood at last something she cannot put into words. Outside, the sun has set. Murphy has lit candles for them. They are still tangled together, side by side now with their arms and legs entwined, as he rocks into her, his nose bumping sometimes against her cheek.

“Does this feel weird?” he asks. His voice is hoarse as if he had been shouting, although they have been quiet, quiet and careful with each other all this time.

Raven shakes her head, hums a quiet little _no_ under her breath. “You’re good, don’t worry.”

“No, I meant—” He pulls her closer, hitching her leg up over his leg. “Everything.”

She considers. Kisses him again.

“Yes.”

Like something has tied her up with him, but she cannot see the ties nor feel them, except for the aftermath of them: every tiny spot where his skin touches her skin.

“I don’t want to stop, though,” she adds.

“Just wanna kill me when you’re done?” he asks, and this, the guilt in his eyes and the question itself, that he can even think about an _after_, make her realize, in a dull but cavernous way, something she should have known all along. That he wants her so ardently because of the magic, but underneath, he wants her in a simpler, stupidly human way.

They did meet once, before. Two, three years ago, in a port city on the coast. Still in their teens then. He bought a blade from her, a specialty of hers that glowed and burned when danger was near. She remembers thinking that he was a little rough, a little dangerous. That he’d be a survivor in the end.

“I told you,” she says, nudging lips against lips, “you’re not dying.”

“Living again, maybe?” he whispers, so low that she almost does not hear.

*

Murphy sits on the edge of the bed, watching her as she gets dressed. Several hours of darkness still await them before dawn, and the settlement is quiet, and so is their room. She feels the slightest touch of self-consciousness, for the first time, worrying at the edges of this lull. She’s still aware, despite the space between them, of the pulsing, living magic warming her from within.

“You sure this is a good idea?” Murphy asks, as she throws his clothes at him. “The only thing worse than getting caught in bed together in Clarke’s house is getting caught together in public—”

“It’s not public. It’s the most private place in the settlement. I don’t think anyone else has been up there since the place was built.” 

She expects he’ll argue with her again, but he just shrugs, and pulls his shirt on over his head.

*

“How did I not know this was here?” Murphy asks, as he pokes his head into the attic space above the main hall. Raven, behind him on the ladder, pokes at his leg and urges him the rest of the way up.

“You tell me,” she answers. “I think it was supposed to be a storage space. I don’t know.” She pulls herself up through the floor, closes the trapdoor neatly behind them. “It’s mine now, though.”

“Actually, I’d say it’s _ours_—Wait, do you have the power to erase memories?” He scrunches up his nose, pretending to be thoughtful, but Raven only rolls her eyes, crosses the space between them, balls her hands into fists in the front of his shirt.

“You’re not as funny as you think you are.”

“I am hilarious." 

And then she is kissing him again, or the other way around. They stumble over to the collection of blankets and pillows she’s made for herself in the corner, tripping over each other’s feet: that magic thrum again, and how she wants to wrap her legs around him, see his eyes reflecting the shine of the moon through the window. How he’s a light in the dark.

*

So easy, so easy, to feel without thinking. John Murphy, human arson, one-man riot, bringing chaos to their safe place: a threat at the gate. She wanted to hate him. Maybe he’s a murderer or maybe not; or maybe she is. Maybe she is the menace, the wild card, the unknown.

Raven Reyes, too dangerous for her mother’s house.

She can taste herself on his lips.

*

Collapsed against the pillows, his hard breath against the back of her shoulder. They roll themselves around until they’re tangled in the blankets; Murphy tangles his fingers in her hair. Urgency in his kiss, though she’s struggling for air, sweating and warm in the small, hidden space.

She grabs blindly for his hand, breaks their kiss only when she can look up and see his fingers twined up in her fingers. She holds their hands up between them. Her thumb traces the burn-scars on the edges of his palms.

“You want to know what happened?” he asks, and Raven, who understands what he means, nods simply, and lets him free his hand from her grip.

He props himself up on his elbow, his head in his hand. She lies back and stares up at him in the dim light, the grey pre-dawn light, watches him looking down at his own palm.

“Wells showed up dead,” he says, to start. “King Wells, you know. Murdered. And _who_ would want to do that?”

A burst of flame shoots up from his skin, and Raven jumps. Murphy curls his fingers safely around the fire.

“Was his body burned?” Raven whispers, when he doesn’t speak.

“No. He was stabbed, and one of my knives was found near him. As if we didn’t all have weapons still, from our old lives, or pasts that we were trying to get rid of. I guess some of us are just more criminal than others.” He stretches his fingers out again. “Or more dangerous than others.”

“So that’s how you got involved in the whole—”

“By being falsely accused, yeah. You can’t imagine how fast they turned, Clarke and Bellamy at the head of the mob, ready to kill me. Wells was Clarke's best friend. Then the girl, Charlotte, confessed. But she was barely more than a kid, younger than the rest of us, even; no one was going to go after her that way. And I… might have pointed out the hypocrisy.”

The rest hangs in the silence. Raven counts her breaths, steadies herself. She pictures the mob, the violence, the chaos, imagines she can hear echoes of it in their small, peaceful home.

“If it matters,” he adds, nearly inaudibly, “I don’t think I drove her to her death.”

He starts to close his hand to snuff out the flame, but Raven stops him with a gentle touch of her fingers to his fingers. He looks up, meets her eye for the first time.

“I hated them for a long time,” he says. “And I hated myself for coming back here, for wanting Arcadia to be the last place I saw.”

“What about now?” Raven asks. “Do you still hate them?”

_Because_, she thinks, _they regret it_: the sorrow in Clarke’s voice, the unease she felt through Bellamy’s touch.

Murphy shakes his head. He closes his hand, then opens it again; faint wisps of smoke trail up from his skin and curl through the air in front of his face.

“I don’t think I have it in me anymore,” he says.

The sun is starting to break through the grey light, a pink haze like distant fire glowing through the window. Raven feels a bright, clean clarity seeping through her, too. The last of the potion’s effects are draining away. And the feeling that fills the empty spaces of her, in its wake, is smaller and simpler, a beginning only, of unknown contour and shape. She cannot tell herself she isn’t frightened, and she cannot say she is not excited, too.

She slides her hand into Murphy’s and gives it a hard squeeze. He leans in—she catches him smiling, softly—and presses his forehead against hers.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> If you did not find this fic through Chopped and would like to know more about the challenge, check out their tumblr @100choppedchallenge.
> 
> This fic has an accompany moodboard [here](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/188822560315/exiles-murphyraven-3k-rated-m-summary-john). I also wrote a bunch of notes on it, [here](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/188826971220/november-4-notes-on-exiles).


End file.
